New Breed of Paul Bunyans Likely to Favor Joysticks, Not Axes

With a flick of his wrist and the tap of a button, Matt Armstrong effortlessly plucks another 33-foot log from a pile and gently places it on a logging truck.

He extends the robot arm to flip one log end-to-end for a better fit. He opens wide a pair of giant jaws, called “grapples,” to nudge two trees together, then delicately closes the jaws to rearrange one tree just so.

If logging has a future in California and the Pacific Northwest, it lies with the sophisticated machinery wielded by deft operators like the 23-year-old Armstrong.

Almost no one cuts the big trees anymore--old-growth timber on public lands is virtually off-limits to protect the habitat of threatened and endangered species like spotted owls, and few private holdings have any old-growth trees left.

With the supply of big logs dried up, sawmills have retooled to handle smaller logs. Loggers’ work has changed too. The emphasis is on thinning the forests by taking smaller trees.

That makes this job--661 acres scattered across two Sierra ridges, 40 miles of rough logging road from the nearest town--something of an anachronism. Armstrong and his eight fellow loggers are engaged in what may be one of the last big-tree cuts on public land.

Taking the big trees from the Stanislaus National Forest was allowed this time only because the tracts are outside the range of California spotted owls, says Bruce Hockinson, who oversaw the timber sale for the U.S. Forest Service.

A timber surveyor for the agency decided the tracts were too densely forested and should be thinned by removing smaller trees. The oldest, tallest trees, which formed a high canopy, were also marked for cutting to let more light into the forest and allow younger trees to thrive.

The job will remove much of the fuel that feeds wildfires and at the same time create the kind of open grove that would occur naturally if periodic wildfires were allowed to burn unhindered, Hockinson says.

The oldest trees are included for another reason, Hockinson says: to lure bidders who might find it unprofitable to take only small ones.

Sierra Pacific Industries, the state’s largest landowner and timber company, paid $209,000 for the trees two years ago, then hired Armstrong’s crew to cut them.

This is a crew replete with the latest technology.

Armstrong sits 12 feet off the ground in the cab of a quarter-million-dollar “heeler-loader,” a specially outfitted crane set atop caterpillar tracks. With a joystick in each hand, he manipulates the 32-foot-long hydraulic arm and pincers with a surgeon’s precision.

“The best thing to do is get a 12-year-old who’s been playing Nintendo the last few years. That’s all it is, is pushing buttons and working joysticks,” Armstrong says.

Logging is one of the last agricultural practices to be mechanized. Much as crops are harvested with combines, trees are cut, stacked and trimmed by machine.

A dozen loggers wielding chain saws can be replaced by a single operator in a “feller-buncher,” which cuts and stacks trees in one step. It makes logging possible in forests so densely packed that trees would have no place to fall if they were cut by hand.

Jim Armstrong, Matt’s father, takes care of the next task--trimming away branches and cutting the trees to length--with a “stroker-delimber”; it lifts each trunk and cuts off its branches with a single stroke of curved blades as if it were stripping kernels off an ear of corn.

With lasers, the machine measures each log to a preset length requested by the sawmill, then lowers a computerized chain saw to make the cut.

The elder Armstrong quickly swivels the machine back and forth, delimbing trees and stacking them for loading. He tosses treetops and fallen branches onto a pile that grows 25 feet high.

This “slash” isn’t burned as it once was. Instead, the leftovers are fed into a chipping machine capable of chewing up trunks 24 inches across. The chips are burned by sawmills and power plants to produce steam or electricity.

Things may be getting even more sophisticated as the U.S. Forest Service increasingly demands that loggers minimize their impact on the forest floor.

A machine called a processor lets loggers pluck trees from 20 feet away, trim their branches, then stack them onto another machine, called a forwarder, that hauls the trees to trucks for loading.

The combination lets loggers cut trees and get them out of the forest without dragging, which churns up the ground and damages tree roots.

“The Forest Service always likes new and exotic toys, but the economics sometimes gets lost on them,” Armstrong complains. “We can barely pay the bills on all this.”

On this job, cutting old and new trees, Armstrong’s crew exhibits a mix of old and new technique.

The feller-buncher has already been through the forest, clearing the small trees. Now it’s Bobby Dues’ turn.

Dues is what’s known as a “faller.” Fifty years old, he works the old-fashioned way, stalking the forest with chain saw and ax. His quarry is the big tree, too big for the machines.

Red firs 150 years old, 5 feet wide at the base and 150 feet tall tremble at the bite of his saw. They sway gently, tip as if in slow motion, then fall with a rush of wind and a bang like a gunshot.

But the harvest of old trees has grown so rare, and mechanized equipment so pervasive, that there is less and less work for old-time loggers like Dues. He is a fifth-generation logger, but he’s happy his son became a building contractor.

“I told him there’s not much of a career here,” he says. “There’s not too much use for what I do.”

Dues had sworn he wouldn’t be doing this either. He says he left home at 15 to avoid following his father into the forests. He wound up singing and playing guitar in nightclubs across the Southwest. He came back to California to log for just one summer, he told himself.

That was 27 years ago.

“I got married, and the money was good, so here I am, 50 years old. I swore when I came out here I wasn’t going to be one of those old guys, aching and groaning. But I’m starting to slow down a bit.”

So is Lash Eisenhauer, at the ripe old age of 32.

He operates the crew’s “skidder,” a four-wheel-drive tractor equipped with grapples for dragging trees out of the forest.

His eyes are red from the pervasive sawdust, his face and clothes black from clouds of talcum-fine dirt churned up in the tinder-dry Sierra forest. He just visited the chiropractor after months of bouncing around in the skidder 10 or 12 hours a day, and is thinking about working construction.

“It beats you up after a while,” says Eisenhauer, who followed his father and grandfather into logging when he turned 18.

Marshall Huntoon, another member of the crew, started topping trees with an ax when he was 13. He graduated to a chain saw and switched to running skidders about 25 years ago, back when skidders were state of the art.

Now 49, he figures he’ll keep logging--and learning the latest technology--for years to come.

“I’m going to keep doing it as long as I can,” Huntoon says. “I like being in the woods--I’ve been in the woods all my life.”